Fedora 36 Planning To Run Wayland By Default With NVIDIA's Proprietary Driver

[bple2137]

As GNOME 42.2 made it into Arch stable repo, I did some testing on Ampere graphics, and unfortunately no way to switch just yet for me:

* Cursor freezes on high CPU load
* OBS won't start with Wayland backend showing error message that the GPU is unsupported. It can run in Xwayland, although
* DMA-BUF is unsupported, so no screen capture anyway
* Gamescope won't run due to some missing features
* Games are very choppy when framerate goes bellow the monitor refresh rate
* The VRAM usage is very high compared to X11 session and it's not being completely freed when apps are closed

It might take some time to get the default Wayland session reasonable for NVIDIA drivers (but at least it's some starting point)

[Vorpal]

That is quite simply not true. Reverse-prime on xorg is pretty flawless now, meaning dgpu external works nicely. In 99% of cases you can easily leave the defualt xorg hybrid offload config as is and be perfectly fine.

Wayland on iGPU with dGPU offload works mostly well now, with GBM sure to kill the remaining bugs. Wayland with iGPU-external out + nvidia offload works, and will work even better with all GBM parts in place.

The future of hybrid nvidia on Linux is bright.

Nvidia is just plain buggy on both wayland and X currently with hybrid graphics. At least for the two laptops I use. That is a small sample size, sure. But lots of other people seem to be complaining too.

It kind of works on my personal Thinkpad (T480) since it indeed has all external outputs hooked up to the iGPU. Still not as stable as running pure intel graphics though! There are random (as in, doesn't happen every time, but almost every time) suspend/resume issues if I enable the nvidia GPU in it. These issues consist of the display completely freezing. I can still SSH in. Nothing in dmesg. Both X and wayland are affected. Happened under Ubuntu. Still happens under Arch.

On my work laptop (Thinkpad P15 Gen1) with external outputs connected to the nvidia GPU it is way buggier (but less freezy!). Almost every time I wake it up from suspend I have to either connect/disconnect an external monitor or run a script that changes screen resolution back and forth (using a global hotkey using AutoKey). Otherwise I get a black screen on the built in screen. Doesn't happen if I use pure intel graphics. But then I also get no external monitors (showstopper for me) and no CUDA acceleration for pytorch (also a showstopper). I haven't tested this one with wayland as I'm on Ubuntu LTS for ROS (a platform for research robotics) support.

However, nvidia on a desktop works just fine. The 1070 in the desktop I'm writing this on is rock solid. Admittedly I never do suspend/resume on it, so that could also be the problem, since that is where I have problems with nvidia graphics on laptops.

[Vorpal]

I have the same laptop for work too and I'm hating it because if I plug an external screen, the fan is active almost all the time.

Do you also observe that? Did you find any mitigation?

In comparison, the previous laptop I used, a P50 also with a Nvidia card was always silent unless you started a heavy GPU/CPU task.

I can't say I noticed it that much. The fans definitely goes crazy when any video meeting software is running (Teams, Zoom, etc).

Check which fan is going maybe? The left one seems to be for the CPU and the right one for the GPU. Also check with the command line tool nvidia-smi to see the GPU load. It could be something as simple as your desktop environment being too fancy and using to much OpenGL to render 2D effects. I had that problem on a previous computer. I switched to a simpler DE that didn't do that.

Also, it is at least better than some colleagues who have Dell laptops. They are way noisier and with very high pitched fans.

[fluke]

You are not the only one. Hybrid graphics is broken for EVERYONE on both X11 and Wayland; and anyone who says it works fine is either someone who doesn't use external monitors, or someone who doesn't care about 10 fps desktop animations.

That is quite simply not true. Reverse-prime on xorg is pretty flawless now, meaning dgpu external works nicely. In 99% of cases you can easily leave the defualt xorg hybrid offload config as is and be perfectly fine.

Wayland on iGPU with dGPU offload works mostly well now, with GBM sure to kill the remaining bugs. Wayland with iGPU-external out + nvidia offload works, and will work even better with all GBM parts in place.

The future of hybrid nvidia on Linux is bright.

[sarmad]

Really? So will I be able to use the desktop normally with Wayland and then Steam to offload games to the nVidia GPU properly?

Yes, I had that working in Ubuntu 21.10, and working out of the box. The issue though is that external monitor, i.e. reverse prime, didn't work for me under Wayland.

[sarmad]

I would say it works perfectly on Windows in all cases, including multi-monitor, display MUXes, or just sending the image back to igpu. Tried myself, no issues with multiple machines.

On my side I had issues where the dGPU would unnecessarily be switched on, causing unnecessary heat and battery drain. This is MSI GS66 running Windows 10. This is not to mention the hardware level issue of not being able to connect an external monitor without switching on the dGPU.

[cewbdex]

Not only are you ignorant about the technical details, you also misquoted me. I never said it works "perfectly" on Windows, because it actually doesn't. I said it works fine; it still has bugs but are bearable under Windows compared to Linux.

I would say it works perfectly on Windows in all cases, including multi-monitor, display MUXes, or just sending the image back to igpu. Tried myself, no issues with multiple machines.

[cewbdex]

Hybrid graphics with nvidia work fine on X and Wayland now, I've been running Wayland exclusively since nvidia added support.

I use Arch, btw.

Really? So will I be able to use the desktop normally with Wayland and then Steam to offload games to the nVidia GPU properly?

[smitty3268]

Since it's an Optimus laptop I do know Wayland SDL games works on the Intel card. But not on nvidia

Ok, thanks for checking.

[sarmad]

Yes, it works perfectly fine on my Laptop. The only Issue I think is that HDMI loses audio when Dynamic Power Management is enabled. So I setup a script to disable Dynamic Power Management to enable full GPU mode when I need it.

I use mostly a 144hz Monitor which most of the times I connect through both HDMI or HDMI through USB-C (Dock) depending if I am working or not.
In other occasions in the past I tried the Mini-DP port successfully.

I installed it following PRIME guide in ArchLinux wiki, by setting the udev and the dynamic power management rule.

With Dynamic Power Management I do have to offload from CPU to Nvidia to run applications on GPU, although some applications like Chrome browser triggers it automatically when running WebGL stuff.
Firefox is absolutely garbage of course so it is out of the question when it comes to hardware acceleartion with Nvidia on Linux over there.
Wayland is also out of the question. It is so far away that I already made my mind that I'll be spending tons of time in X11 in the next years.
I am on KDE Plasma 5.23.x

On my side reverse prime has a pretty bad performance, and connecting over usb-c (which is connected to the iGPU) has issues where the external screen keeps getting switched on and off. This is on Ubuntu 21.10 and the slow performance of reverse prime also exists in Fedora 35, so a newer kernel doesn't seem to resolve this. I bet this is a Gnome vs KDE situation.